How Task Completion Decreases Anxiety

Whether it's processing emotions or a quick task or a project, prioritizing completing a full cycle from beginning to end does wonders to decrease your stress levels and increase your confidence.

👋 Hi! I'm Yue. Chief Product Officer turned Leadership Coach. My personal mission is to help women and minorities break through to the C-suite. Subscribe to get future posts in your inbox.

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(Grooming? Check! Teddy the Corgi, Barcelona, Spain)

Client: I am stressed and anxious at work most of the time. I try to start the day well, but by 10 am I find myself trying to do many things at once, getting pinged from all sides, and running from meeting to meeting (physically and mentally). I remind myself to breathe and eat well, but it doesn’t calm my anxiety. How can I destress and avoid burnout?

The vast majority of American workers are stressed and anxious. The American Psychological Association found that “77 percent of U.S. workers reported stress at work in the past month, with 57 percent reporting negative health effects as a result.” Anxiety is now the number one presenting issue among American workers, above relationship issues, family issues, addiction, and grief (Forbes, March 2024). Honestly, I don’t think you need the numbers — just look around you.

American workplace culture would like us to work hard (e.g. spend hours on our screens, sit at our desks for hours, eat quickly in 20 minutes while answering emails without talking to anyone) and then spend more money to compensate (e.g. pay more for organic veggies and fruits, buy fancy gym passes or equipment, hire a therapist out of pocket, pay for faster commute options, hire a babysitter to watch your kids while you do those things).

The work culture in places like Silicon Valley has become even more intense with the rise of “super ICs” (aka super ambitious, overworked people taking on 2.5 people’s jobs), companies doing layoffs and keeping scope yet not re-hiring, and competition cycles getting shorter and shorter.

Finally, while we may be out of the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic, we cannot underestimate the psychological impact of global conflicts, racism, extreme political stances, mass shootings, climate-related disasters, and a turbulent economy.

With all of these external factors contributing to stress and anxiety, it’s critical to adopt tools that reduce stress. In today’s post, I will share one tried and true framework to reduce stress — task completion.

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Today’s Post

Words: 1997 | Est. Reading Time: ~8 mins

Today we’re going to learn how to decrease the level of anxiety through task completion. We’ll cover in detail:

1. Why incomplete tasks create stress, leading to more incomplete tasks and more stress

2. How to break the cycle with a 3-min task every day

3. How to complete bigger tasks (paid)

4. How to fully process your emotions and “complete the task” (paid)

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Incomplete Tasks Compounds Stress

When we start but don’t complete tasks, our brain has to store 10X the amount of information about that task than if we finished it. We attempt to remember what we have done, the current state, and what still needs to get done. We also start to worry about when we can pick it up again, whether we’ll still remember the context, and what factors might have changed at that point that renders what we’ve done so far no longer useful. That is a lot of information to remember for a single task.

Now let’s imagine we have 4 or 5 in-flight tasks. Now, it starts to become too much for your brain’s working memory to handle, and the stress that comes from trying to remember builds. Your brain will exhaust itself simply trying to remember all the in-progress tasks — instead of resting, it just constantly cycles through to-dos.

If you get interrupted multiple times working on a task, or you realize that not finishing one task means not being able to complete other tasks as well, the stress of everything potentially going awry begins to compound.

It’s a vicious cycle. The more tasks you have in flight, the more anxious you’ll become. If you’re interrupted a few times, the entire task also takes longer due to time context-switching. With higher anxiety and a longer time to complete a task, fewer tasks are completed. More tasks stay in flight, causing more stress.

Break the Vicious Cycle with a 3-minute Task

The way to break the vicious cycle is through completing tasks. When you complete tasks, you erase all the contextual information about the task from your working memory. This decreases your stress levels. You also get a nice dopamine hit that gives you more energy and confidence that you can get work done. This encourages you to work faster, and even free up some extra time to complete other tasks.

First, start small and give yourself every chance of success. For many people, that means kicking off your workday with completing a 3-minute task. Maybe it’s an email you need to respond to, an expense report to submit, a document to review, or a meeting to schedule. Maybe it’s responding to that teacher’s email, submitting a form for after-school activities, or folding the laundry.

Pick the task the night before, book 10 minutes on your calendar (yes for a 3-minute task), and unless there is a natural disaster (or a toddler screaming in your ear), complete the task.

Then do it again the next day. And the next day. Save a quick task to be your first task the next day. Don’t save more than one, because that adds too much to the “context-holding” part of your brain.

Starting your day with completing a task means starting your day with a nice dopamine hit. Write it down on a paper to-do list just to cross it off again.

Deep Work Three Times a Week for 2 Hours

To complete larger projects, block time for deep work 3 times a week for 2 hours. Complete an entire group presentation or strategy document in that timeframe. Build out an entire meeting schedule or a new process for the team. Clean out your inbox and Slack messages. As a PM, this is probably one of the hardest yet most valuable things I learned to do.

Yes, it needs to be 2 hours. One hour is too short — you’re often still context-switching and catching up on what needs to get done. 90 minutes may be enough but doesn’t give you time to mess up or take a quick coffee or bathroom break. Make it two whole hours.

Yes, it needs to be 3 times a week. I recommend Monday mornings, Wednesday afternoons, and Friday mornings. If you schedule it for 3 times a week, you’ll likely successfully protect 2 or 2.5 times. If you aim for 2, you’ll end up with 1 or maybe even 0, because 1 is lonely and “not a thing”.

You might look at your calendar and go “There’s no way I can fit three 2-hour chunks.” I encourage you to start deleting or combining meetings to make space. How about a three-way one-on-one? Could you delegate attendance at this meeting to a team member? Does that meeting need to be an hour or 30 minutes…or an email?

Or better yet, delete all your meetings and start over with putting the deep work time blocks in first.

For your sanity, it’s okay to look 2 weeks out. Your calendar probably isn’t as scary 2 weeks out and you can better fit in those three 2 hour chunks. Practice protecting them from others for the next 2 weeks.

Make Your Workload Sane

The best way to figure out how much you should and can take on is to try and schedule all your to-dos in your calendar and see if they fit. Do it as a thought exercise more than an actual schedule.

• Start with your highest-priority work to-dos

• Add-in necessities like bathroom breaks, food, commute time

• Add in routine work like email, Slack, and messages. Combine your daily email time into 2 hours, even if tactically you check your email 10 times a day for 10 minutes.

• Sprinkle in the lower-priority to-dos if you still have space (or rethink whether you can use that time better).

If you have more To-do’s than what fits on this fake schedule, then it’s time to start off-loading. When you have more to-dos than time available, you’ll end up with incomplete tasks. When you have multiple incomplete tasks, you’ll complete even less. So, when you take on too much, you’re saying no to completing your high-priority tasks. Good reason to say no to that lower-priority task right?

Fully process your emotions

Did you know that fully processing emotions is also a task? We typically don’t think of it as a task — more like a thing that happens to us. However, unprocessed emotions build up in your body and increase your baseline anxiety level. It creates that perplexing type of anxiety that you always have but do not know why. For many of my clients, this base level of anxiety is layered on top of the anxiety associated with incomplete work, creating a particularly unpredictable mental state. Some people will find themselves tearing up or lashing out for no good reason.

It’s amazing how many of us (myself included until recently) never learned to fully process our emotions. As children, many of us were told to “stop crying”, “don’t let that get to you”, or “it’s okay. you’re okay. let’s move on.” When I was first told I needed to “fully process my emotions”, I didn’t even know what that meant.

So what does it mean to fully process emotions? It’s three steps: letting yourself feel the emotions, telling yourself it’s okay and normal, and then taking a small positive action.

First, truly feel the emotions by letting them run through your body physically — do you feel your gut wrench? your forehead sweat? tears of joy or sadness? Then in your mind, acknowledge the emotion and let it keep going.

Don’t hold on to it. Don’t try to pretend it’s not there. Don’t run away from it. These may all be your first instinct when the emotion comes along. Fight the urge.

The emotion will slowly dissipate over 15 to 20 minutes (yes that long!). When it has mostly disappeared, do something that brings a little bit of joy or calmness. It could be humming a favorite tune, giving yourself a mental hug, getting some fresh air and sunlight, or eating a small bite of chocolate. This completes the processing of the emotion on a positive note.

In short…

When you are in a place where you are completing your tasks regularly, your anxiety level will go down. By not having to remember work in progress and getting your regular dopamine hit that comes with completion, you’ll begin to feel a sense of confidence and calm. A bit closer to that “I’ve got this” or “I can do anything” feeling that most of us love.

That’s all folks. See you next week at 3:14pm!

Yue

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Thank you so much! ❤️

For more: 1:1 Executive Coaching / Career Accelerator for Senior Leaders / Mastering Executive Presence & Communication course; Unleashing Your Leadership Superpowers Course / Book: The Uncommon Executive: Breakthrough to the C-suite as a Minority